


to grow a pack

by verity



Series: tween wolf [23]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Friendship, Gen, Romance Novel, Werewolf Culture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-01
Updated: 2013-05-01
Packaged: 2017-12-10 03:21:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/781200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/verity/pseuds/verity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Within the first hundred pages of <i>Waltzing With Wolves</i>, Stiles realizes he was wrong.</p><p>Scott isn't William, the soft-spoken, gentle beta with tender golden eyes, and Laura isn't Vigny, the red-eyed duke with designs on Cecilia's hand and her virtue. (Stiles is fairly certain that Laura doesn't think of Scott like that, but, still: gross.) No, Scott is Cecilia, and Laura is her mother.</p>
            </blockquote>





	to grow a pack

**Author's Note:**

  * For [eriizabeto](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=eriizabeto).



> IMPORTANT: in case you missed it, I [posted some excerpts from "Waltzing With Wolves" on tumblr a few days ago](http://ladyofthelog.tumblr.com/post/49156975763/tween-wolf-bonus-waltzing-with-wolves-werewolf). You'll probably want to read that for context.
> 
>  
> 
> ALSO, this is the next day after we last saw Stiles telling Scott about the romance novel. I forgot to put that in there. But now you know?

Within the first hundred pages of _Waltzing With Wolves_ , Stiles realizes he was wrong.

Scott isn't William, the soft-spoken, gentle beta with tender golden eyes, and Laura isn't Vigny, the red-eyed duke with designs on Cecilia's hand and her virtue. (Stiles is fairly certain that Laura doesn't think of Scott like that, but, still: gross.) No, Scott is Cecilia, and Laura is her mother.

> "What makes you think I could not rule my own pack?" Cecilia said. "You and father gave me no brothers or sisters. Do you expect to pass the mantle to Barrington? To Marianne?"
> 
> "You're a child," Lady Merriwether said, eyes narrowing behind those half-moon glasses that were all affectation and no aid. "What do you think makes an alpha, Cecilia? You shirk Dorothea's recitals, Marianne's dances, you'd abandon my own drawing-room if you could get away with it."
> 
> Cecilia couldn't help but scoff at that. "Marianne's dances are hardly fashionable. Do you want me to make a good match, Mother? How would _that_ help me?"
> 
> "You haven't the least interest in making a good match," her mother said. "All that's in your head is that Allen boy. He's got no money and no inheritance settled on him, and you've a thousand a year, no more. How are you to grow a pack on that?"
> 
> "William will provide for our pups," Cecilia said. Her hands tightened in the peach silk of her morning dress, and she had to work to unclench them before the fabric was ruined by her claws or crushed by her grip.
> 
> Her mother laughed.

The comparison is not very flattering.

—

Scott has a list, and Stiles has a list. _Isaac_ is the only name on Scott's list; _Erica_ is the only one on Stiles's. The lists were the easy part.

It started a year ago, when Scott showed up at Stiles's house after school with a worried look on his face. "I think Isaac's dad is hurting him," he said. "He smells—hurt, and he has bruises, I saw them in the locker room today. Fingers."

"Fuck." Stiles isn't exactly friends with Isaac, but he's the least douchey guy Scott hangs out with on a regular basis. "Do you want me to tell my dad?"

"We could try," Scott said, but his tone was skeptical.

It took a week before Scott got all low-voiced and intense on Skype. "What if we could give Isaac the bite?"

"Laura would never do that," Stiles said. Laura's all wrapped up in her own pack—Derek and Daphne, Stiles when she thinks she can get away with it, Scott if he suddenly decides that a supermarket's big enough for the both of them—turned inward, away from the rest of the world. "She's—"

"Yeah," Scott said. "I know."

—

The next time Stiles helped Erica through a seizure, he thought about it, pulling her body to him and making sure she didn't choke. Scott spent years being teased on the playground, getting winded if he took the stairs too fast, but that changed the night he lost his inhaler on the forest floor and they stayed, searching, trying to push back the oncoming dark. What would Erica be like without this constant shadow hanging over her?

Erica acts like it's no big deal, most of the time, doesn't ask why Stiles has volunteered to be her seizure dog or talk about how they've become harder and harder to control. She was diagnosed with epilepsy when she was four. This is her status quo, the way things have always been. That doesn't stop her from wanting to do normal things, the stuff Stiles used to take for granted: learning to drive, climbing the rock wall in gym.

So, Stiles starts researching. There's no way he can ask Laura, because she'll stop listening as soon as she hears _hey, how do you become an alpha?_ and assume that Scott's had a change of heart that puts him on Team Murder. Deaton stonewalls Stiles when he asks something as basic as _when do I start being able to levitate pencils on my own? because Willow—_ , so, no. There's nothing in his mother's books about werewolves; that could be one of the words Stiles doesn't know, but it seems unlikely from context.

Grandma sends him some wool roving and a drop spindle and suggests he take up a new hobby.

—

Another hundred pages, and Scott-as-Cecilia is starting to look a little less bleak. As it turns out, Cecilia doesn't just want to start her own pack with William the sad poet; her best friend Archibald is dying from consumption and longs to take the bite. Lady Merriwether disapproves of Archibald's unsavory connections and is reluctant to add anyone else to the list of betas she has to marry off in the next few seasons.

Stiles has to pause mid-chapter, though, and splay the book across his stomach while he gropes for his phone somewhere near where he's lying on the bed. Predictably, it's migrated under his butt sometime in the last hour.

The text message is from a number he doesn't recognize.

_hey its allison. u want to go bowling? plz rescue me from lydia & her bf they are kind of terrifying, scott is coming 2._

Bowling with Lydia Martin? Ugh.

 _Sure,_ Stiles replies. _I'll meet you there._

**Author's Note:**

> I'm [ladyofthelog](http://ladyofthelog.tumblr.com) on tumblr.


End file.
